Tag: cars

The auto fender repair sector, particularly the smart repair side of it, is a booming business. Automobile bumper damage is definitely the most common car body repair performed in great britain. This article will briefly explore the history of fender repair and a brief guide to smart repair, focused on mobile auto body repair vs. a stationary site repair.

My first personal experience of the auto body repair industry was in 1995 when I was a passenger driven in a brand-new Ford Fiesta going for lunch at the McDonald’s Drive Thru. On the road through the driver, who shall not be named, drove too close to the big, ornamental rockery that McDonalds had set near the entry to add that “classy” feel to the restaurant. The look of sickening horror on the young female driver’s face complemented perfectly the hideous scraping sounds. A review of the damage showed a foot long scuff with a couple of deep gouges down the side of the front fender on the passenger side. I strove to calm her down and told her not to worry, my ‘skilled’ knowledge of auto body repairs explained that it was not that bad and she could likely get it repaired for £50 and never have to tell her father what she’d done three days after passing her driving test.

One excursion to the Ford main dealer later and we were both reeling from the £400 estimate for a new fender (plus the VAT of course, and a four day frame). “Can you not just repair the scrape?” I’d asked naively. In 1995, S.M.A.R.T repair was only just getting off the ground in the USA and would not actually strike the UK for another five years. Pricey lesson learnt, we both moved on (sorry Christine).

The exact origins are not clear but the technology and ideas behind it were enough of a paradigm shift in the car body repair business the technique spread very rapidly through the US and the remaining world. Auto body car dent repair Wakefield shops had not been unable to repair rather than replace components for several years already but the coming of these new tools and techniques and the ability to provide the repairs without a static spray booth meant a whole immense new mobile business sprang up.

Traditional auto body repair shops still are, and have been, to charging high prices for a bumper repair constrained. There is little difference in the cost of the repair to the body shop if they repair an entire fender or fix a bumper corner. The base price must always include a premium for the fixed overhead costs they can be stuck with: rent on the premises, business rates, set minimal staffing levels, huge equipment costs for spray booths etc…

In comparison, a mobile clever repair technician can control all his gear from a mobile workshop that was single, normally a medium sized van, and thus the base cost of repair is normally only constrained to the travelling time to and from a repair job. The end result is a price to the customer that is usually 50% lower for a bumper repair which is every bit as great (and often better) than an auto body shop repair.